


Warpaint

by Fells



Category: The Traitor Baru Cormorant - Seth Dickinson
Genre: F/F, Kissing, Makeup as Warpaint, Pre-Battle
Language: English
Status: Completed
Published: 2019-01-02
Updated: 2019-01-02
Packaged: 2019-09-27 20:55:28
Rating: General Audiences
Warnings: Creator Chose Not To Use Archive Warnings
Chapters: 1
Words: 862
Publisher: archiveofourown.org
Story URL: https://archiveofourown.org/works/17169230
Author URL: https://archiveofourown.org/users/Fells/pseuds/Fells
Summary: Baru is no artist but the anticipation of battle and finality, ofaction, gives her vision. If she could give her work a frame she would call it:The Demon Tain Hu.





	Warpaint

**Author's Note:**

  * For [sternerstuff](https://archiveofourown.org/users/sternerstuff/gifts).



"Ake gave me instruction," Baru declares, a perilous and compelling claim. Not a lie, _no_ ; Ake styled Baru with paints, tricks and scented elixirs so that she might walk safely down wagon-sketched mud roads in the Vultjag villages years ago, and then as now Baru was nothing if not a quick study. She will be guessing at some of the flicks and gestures, teaching her own hands while staring at the textbook of her memory, but that excites her in some unnamed way. "Sit!"

To her surprise, Tain Hu collects her trailing capes of wolfhide and blood red wool in her right arm and obediently sits on the rough stool set in the centre of Baru's tent. It's not much more that a wide, tall tree stump hacked clean and flat, but Baru had asked one of the Coyote soldiers to make it for her and the woman seemed to take such joy in both the request and then the thanks she received on delivery. Perhaps it was foolish of her but it was one of Baru's favourite camp possessions and she was pleased and proud to see it used by esteemed company.

"Do not," Tain Hu warns icily, "try to make me a lady today. We aim to destroy titles and the old privilege. When we win, it will mean the decline and doom of all that pagentry." And she stares at Baru with eyes that reflect the lone bowl of coals lighting that little, private space, heated and pulsing, ready to burst with flame at the touch of a spark. She will raze Sieroch, Baru thinks. She will cut it bare and crimson and they will have victory and—and—

"No, that wouldn't serve our purpose at all." Pushing two clay bowls into the duchess' hands, one filled with fresh rabbit blood and one with wood ash, Baru holds Tain Hu's face and considers its clean, carved planes with what she hopes is clinical interest. "I'll make you a monster. A war god. Whatever you like."

At last, on this final day, Baru sees a flash of teeth and anticipation, of brightest and star-cold starvation. And Tain Hu lifts her scarred chin from Baru's grasp; and she says, "Make a wolf bitch with blood in her mouth."

Baru purses her lips. That's how she smiles lately. She has a brush she made from horsetail and she uses it to mix silver ashes and crushed black coal with water to first paint Tain Hu's face into a pale smooth death's-head and then to smudge darkness around her eyes to deepen the sockets. Before the blood, Baru sinks her fingers into the duchess' black hair. With her gloves stripped away, she gently untangles knots and pulls it out to full length, humming very quietly though she doesn't really mean to do so. She also steals a look at the side of Tain Hu's face; her eyes are shut, her expression content, and Baru has the brief, disconcerting sense that she is daring to groom a mountain lynx. The winter made her hair longer in the style of those winter cats, it's a warm, dark mass heaped on her stiff shoulders. Baru combs it out, sections it and folds it into braids as mother Pinion used to do for _her_ : three separate ropes that draw strands tight from the scalp and temples, all then coiled up together in a circlet and pinned down, immovable. When she is finished, Tain Hu wears her hair like a crown of gleaming, melted obsidian.

Baru paints the inner pads of her mouth last, boldest where her lips meet, red smearing softly outward. She looks at those lips and thinks: wolf-bitten, doomed. She has to redo it, the second time with shaking hands, because the moment she is done Tain Hu licks her lips, tosses the bowl aside, clasps the back of Baru's neck and kisses the pigment away, gnawing at Baru's mouth and jaw. That's normal, Baru assures herself (though even her own thoughts sound shrill to her somehow). Battlelust is something she has been witnessing for months as the men and women of the Coyote Rebellion brace themselves against the ideas of starvation, failure and death in combat. She breaks away, swipes Tain Hu's lips red again and lurches back. The duchess laughs, a sound like acrid smoke. She rises and strides out of the tent without a word.

Baru hurries after her. She is not sure why. She must prepare herself as well, and then meet with Lyxaxu and find Xate Olake. Her morning will be a _howling_ whirlwind but she lingers now to lean out of her tent and open her mouth to call out across the cold, black camp to Tain Hu—and then she falls silent at the sight of half a dozen armoured figures all frozen in startled terror as the specter of their general appears before them, unrecognizable.

Tain Hu wheels around and grins at her, a ghastly, beautiful thing to behold. And that is the final, decisive blow. That savage delight is the only banner Baru needs to see raised high in order to feel utterly empty and victorious.

**Author's Note:**

> There was a certain line in your comment... I didn't see it until after the Madness collection closed, but it spoke to meeeee!


End file.
